Business in Vancouver – The development of professional sports in Asia is being undermined by endemic match fixing, engineered by international gangs involved in illegal gambling. The problems of match fixing by bought-off players and referees are at their worst in India, where the national sport is cricket, and in China, where it is football. But the corruption has infected most, if not all, Asian regional soccer leagues, with inquiries currently underway into apparent match fixing in Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia.
In Taiwan the national sport is baseball, which came to the island nation when it became a Japanese colony in 1895, and there too the professional league has been plagued by corruption. Fans have stayed away in droves in disgust at games orchestrated by gangsters. The spread of the infection is being aided by the proliferation of online betting sites. Asians wanting to bet on sports matches and games have an almost infinite number of online bookies available to them, many based outside Asia and regulated by European gambling authorities.
Countries like China and Vietnam have made online betting illegal and blocked the sites of foreign bookmakers. But would-be bettors can bypass these blocks in the same way they can avoid government web censorship by using a virtual private network. Soccer has become the national sport in China as the economy has developed in the last three decades, and expensive new stadiums hosting newly formed league matches have usually been packed to overflowing with fans. But the discovery 10 years ago of match fixing by criminal betting syndicates has changed all that.
